PETER LUCAS: Restoring lawn and order at the Statehouse

Massachusetts Secretary of State Billy Galvin drew a line in the lawn.

And he has dared Gov. Charlie Baker to cross it.

The governor came, he saw -- and he got mowed down. The front lawn at the majestic Massachusetts Statehouse -- or at least a piece of it -- was saved.

The lawn in question is a sliver of grass on the side lawn in front of the historic Statehouse that Baker wanted to turn over to a developer building multimillion-dollar condominiums next door.

The land, across from Boston Common, is the site of a house, torn down long ago, owned by John Hancock, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a Massachusetts governor. A lonely statue of Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) stands there.

"Even James Michael Curley didn't try to sell the Statehouse lawn," Galvin told Frank Phillips, The Boston Globe's reporter/sleuth, who broke the story. Curley is the legendary rogue politician who served as governor and mayor of Boston in the 1930s.

While Curley never sold off pieces of the Statehouse lawn, several Statehouse politicians were prosecuted in the early 1960s for illegally selling the dirt dug up on the Boston Common to a private developer. The ground was dug up to make way for the building of the Boston Common Parking Garage underneath the Common.

Baker claimed to have had the approval for the mini land grab of the Massachusetts Historical Commission.

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Galvin, by virtue of his office, is chairman of the commission, and he vigorously denied the governor's claim, adding that he knew nothing about the plan. And he was angry.

So suddenly the Massachusetts Historical Commission turned into the Massachusetts Hysterical Commission.

The luxury condos are being built at a fine old building at 25 Beacon St., adjacent to the Statehouse, that was owned by the Unitarian Universalist Church before it was sold to developers for $23.6 million in 2014, a sale that included three other buildings behind it.

The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and it abuts the Statehouse. The developers have gutted and refurbished the building, constructing six condos that are being marketed at prices between $9 million and $11 million.

The developers, Sea-Dar Construction-DLJ Beacon Hill LLC, wanted as much as 300 square feet of the Statehouse lawn for enlarged windows for three au-pair suites and a building superintendents living quarters. The price was to be determined.

Baker slipped the proposal for a permanent easement into a supplementary budget that he filed last week. There was no public hearing or public debate on the issue. The Legislature had until this Saturday to act on the matter before its current session ended.

Statehouse reporters have long been on guard for controversial proposals quietly filed in the dying days of a legislative session, and this one was one of them.

Baker initially defended the plan, citing a letter from the commission saying the project would have "no adverse affect" on the property.

Baker recently had led an expedition to the site that included Senate President Stan Rosenberg and House Speaker Robert DeLeo, and they agreed with him that a series of bushes would cover up the windows.

However, both legislative leaders became cautious about the proposal after the story broke in the Globe and was criticized in an editorial that ran July 22 in The Sun of Lowell.

And then a funny thing happened on the way to the governor's lawn party.

Billy Galvin wasn't invited. And the letter of approval, which he did not even see until later, was not a letter of approval at all.

"It's not true. He is twisting what the letter says. He has repeatedly misstated the facts on this issue," Galvin, a Democrat, said of the Republican governor. "The commission never approved an easement."

"You don't give away a permanent easement, no matter how small, to public land that has such historical significance as John Hancock's pasture land, to a private developer," he said.

"Why should the public give up historic public land just to make more money for a developer?" he added.

By Saturday the governor had had it, and he threw in the towel, backing off from his request to turn over the sliver of lawn to the developer. His spokesman said that if the Historical Commission no longer supported the land grab, then the governor would not either.

Thanks to Galvin's line in the lawn, the grass was saved.

Should he be a candidate for governor in 2018, Galvin would naturally campaign on restoring lawn and order to the Massachusetts Statehouse.

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